Lithuanian food & drink

In the dark forests and light summers of Lithuania, expect the unexpected on your plate: from pink soup to amber liqueur.

It’s 1 June and Vilnius’ pink soup festival is in full swing. There’s a foam-covered 500m-long slip and slide that culminates into a pool of foam cubes. There’s a waiter marathon – a 600m dash that’s a souped-up version of an egg and spoon race, where competitors run carrying a full bowl balanced on a tray. Soup-eating records are smashed with abandon. Everything – tablecloths, outfits, crowd control barriers, and the soup itself – is pink.

The Lithuanian summer is like one long cold soup marathon.

“We like to eat it every day in summer,” says Saulius Ruzinskas, owner of Baltic Bike Travel, our Klaipeda-based specialists for Lithuania cycling holidays. “The Lithuanian cold beetroot soup is the best in the world, actually – it’s big speciality.”

It’s a bold claim. Cold soups are popular across Eastern Europe; Latvia has its own beetroot version. Lithuania’s is made with beetroot, kefir, cucumber and dill. Give it a stir and you’ll uncover the two halves of a hard-boiled egg, too. It’s served with boiled or baked potatoes.

“I think the festival actually took place months before I went there, but they were still talking about it!” Nicola Keen, Responsible Travel’s digital marketing manager, travelled to Lithuania in the summer. “One restaurant had made pink soup ice cream!”

The intensely soup-focused summer – people happily eating two, even three, meals of soup a day with a side of potatoes – might make the casual visitor fear that there’s not much more to the Lithuanian food scene. But it’s more down to the deliciousness of the soup than the limitations of the cuisine.

Like its flagship soup, Lithuanian food appears unusual. As of yet, it’s not hugely common to see it outside the country. Its strong flavours and different ingredients can be exciting for newcomers, especially if you’re open to some local equivalences – fried bread instead of French fries, for instance, or sparkling tea instead of soda. “It was definitely stuff I’ve never tried anywhere else,” says Nicola.

Lithuanians like to say that they drink the most beer per capita, and why wouldn’t they? They consider their beer to be some of the best in the world. There’s an emerging craft beer scene and companies like Brooklyn Lager have opened a brewery here in a bid to capitalise on the trend.

“We have really good beer,” says Saulius. “It’s not wine country, although we do produce wines from different berries. They are really interesting – they’re not made from grapes but from different berries made by local producers.”

On our Lithuania tours, you’ll be able to try traditional products at source – like by meeting local fishers and tasting freshly smoked fish that they’ve only just caught and prepared. Or trying rye bread made fresh to an old recipe by a baker who lives just round the corner.

Despite its fresh and flavour-forward summer dishes, the best-known food in Lithuania remains the cepelinai – or zeppelin – an obstinately stodgy potato dumpling encasing a meat filling. The secret to enjoying them? Don’t overindulge.

“Our tour guide had obviously done this before,” says Nicola. “She ordered just one plate for the whole table. As we found out, they’re incredibly filing. You wouldn’t want a whole dish to yourself; you’d be in a food coma for the rest of the day!”

The country does have its fair share of hearty traditional dishes – still found among the cosmopolitan offerings Vilnius. You enjoy dining like a duke on beaver, venison or boar, a la Lithuania’s former rulers, who hunted in the country’s forests.

Other food traditions were forcibly dropped or became hidden over time. Lithuania’s Christianisation and then, much later, its time under Soviet rule forced some communities and their traditions into hiding. The Karaite community – who follow Karaite Judaism – are one such community. Today, their foods are celebrated: you might try kibinai, a meat-stuffed pastry.

Nicola even learnt to make one: “I really enjoyed the cooking lesson and learning about a subculture within a culture. There’s something so rewarding about being in a place and eating the food of that place and understanding the history that goes behind it.”

That’s Lithuania food through and through – rich, fascinating, easy to try, and rewarding to discover. You’ll be back for second helpings.